Both Kramers had died miles apart on the same night, which was a coincidence, and he didn’t like coincidences any better than Summer did. I started to feel sorry for Rick Stockton, the deputy chief down in North Carolina. His decision to let me haul Kramer’s body away was going to look bad, in this new light. It put half the puzzle in the military’s hands. It was going to set up a conflict.
We gave Clark a phone number where he could reach us at Bird, and then we got back in the car. I figured D.C. was another seventy miles. Another hour and ten. Maybe less, the way Summer drove. She took off and found the highway again and put her foot down until the Chevy was vibrating fit to bust.
“I saw the briefcase in the photographs,” she said. “Did you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Does it upset you to see dead people?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. You?”
“It upsets me a little.”
I said nothing.
“You think it was a coincidence?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“So you think the postmortem missed something?”
“No,” I said again. “I think the postmortem was probably accurate.”
“So why are we driving all the way to D.C.?”
“Because I need to apologize to the pathologist. I dropped him in it by sending him Kramer’s body. Now he’s going to have wall-to-wall civilians bugging him for a month. That will piss him off big time.”
But the pathologist was a her, not a him, and she had such a sunny disposition that I doubted anything could piss her off for long. We met with her in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center ’s reception area, four o’clock in the afternoon, New Year’s Day. It looked like any other hospital lobby. There were holiday decorations hanging from the ceilings. They already looked a little tired. Garber was already there. He was sitting on a plastic chair. He was a small man and didn’t seem uncomfortable. But he was quiet. He didn’t introduce himself to Summer. She stood next to him. I leaned on the wall. The doctor faced us with a sheaf of notes in her hand, like she was lecturing a small group of keen students. Her name badge read
“General Kramer died of natural causes,” she said. “Heart attack, last night, after eleven, before midnight. There’s no possibility of doubt. I’m happy to be audited if you want, but it would be a complete waste of time. His toxicology was absolutely clear. The evidence of ventricular fibrillation is indisputable and his arterial plaque was monumental. So forensically, your only tentative question might be whether by coincidence someone electrically stimulated fibrillation in a man almost certain to suffer it anyway within minutes or hours or days or weeks.”
“How would it be done?” Summer asked.
McGowan shrugged. “The skin would have to be wet over a large area. The guy would have to be in a bathtub, basically. Then, if you applied wall current to the water, you’d probably get fibrillation without burn marks. But the guy wasn’t in a bathtub, and there’s no evidence he ever had been.”
“What if his skin wasn’t wet?”
“Then I’d have seen burn injuries. And I didn’t, and I went over every inch of him with a magnifying glass. No burns, no hypodermic marks, no nothing.”
“What about shock, or surprise, or fear?”
The doctor shrugged again. “Possible, but we know what he was doing, don’t we? That kind of sudden sexual excitement is a classic trigger.”
Nobody spoke.
“Natural causes, folks,” McGowan said. “Just a big old heart attack. Every pathologist in the world could take a look at him and there would be one hundred percent agreement. I absolutely guarantee it.”
“OK,” Garber said. “Thanks, Doc.”
“I apologize,” I said. “You’re going to have to repeat all that to about two dozen civilian cops, every day for a couple of weeks.”
She smiled. “I’ll print up an official statement.”
Then she looked at each of us in turn in case we had more questions. We didn’t, so she smiled once more and swept away through a door. It sucked shut behind her and the ceiling decorations rustled and stilled and the reception area went quiet.
We didn’t speak for a moment.
“OK,” Garber said. “That’s it. No controversy with Kramer himself, and his wife is a civilian crime. It’s out of our hands.”
“Did you know Kramer?” I asked him.
Garber shook his head. “Only by reputation.”
“Which was?”
“Arrogant. He was Armored Branch. The Abrams tank is the best toy in the army. Those guys rule the world, and they know it.”
“Know anything about the wife?”
He made a face. “She spent way too much time at home in Virginia, is what I hear. She was rich, from an old Virginia family. I mean, she did her duty. She spent time on-post in Germany, only when you add it up, it really wasn’t a hell of a lot of time. Like now, XII Corps told me she was home for the holidays, which sounds OK, but actually she came home for Thanksgiving and wasn’t expected back until the spring. So the Kramers weren’t real close, by all accounts. No kids, no shared interests.”
“Which might explain the hooker,” I said. “If they lived separate lives.”
“I guess,” Garber said. “I get the feeling it was a marriage, you know, but it was more window dressing than anything real.”
“What was her name?” Summer asked.
Garber turned to look at her.
“Mrs. Kramer,” he said. “That’s all the name we need to know.”
Summer looked away.
“Who was Kramer traveling to Irwin with?” I asked.
“Two of his guys,” Garber said. “A one-star general and a colonel, Vassell and Coomer. They were a real triumvirate. Kramer, Vassell, and Coomer. The corporate face of Armor.”
He stood up and stretched.
“Start at midnight,” I said to him. “Tell me everything you did.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t like coincidences. And neither do you.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Everybody did something,” I said. “Except Kramer.”
Garber looked straight at me.
“I watched the ball drop,” he said. “Then I had another drink. I kissed my daughter. I kissed a whole bunch of people, as I recall. Then I sang ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”
“And then?”
“My office got me on the phone. Told me they’d found out by circuitous means that we had a dead two-star down in North Carolina. Told me the Fort Bird MP duty officer had palmed it off. So I called there, and I got you.”
“And then?”
“You set out to do your thing and I called the town cops and got Kramer’s name. Looked him up and found he was a XII Corps guy. So I called Germany and reported the death, but I kept the details to myself. I told you this already.”
“And then?”
“Then nothing. I waited for your report.”
